The Artist in the Office

Karen is working on her fourth novel. Although her first three novels were published and received good reviews, none of them sold enough copies to allow her to quit her day job. Jack is a fine actor who has played lead roles in community theater productions, but he’s never managed to break into the professional scene. Sam would love to create sculptures for a living, but he has a family to support. All of these people are artists who hold nine-to-five office jobs.

People talented in the arts often end up in office jobs for several reasons. First, the arts are extremely competitive, and while opportunities to earn extra pocket money doing temporary work in the arts are fairly plentiful, those that provide the artist with a decent salary and benefits are rare. Also, achieving excellence in the arts takes lots of time and energy, and office jobs with regular hours and reasonable workloads may leave the worker with more of these than all-consuming professions such as teaching, law, or medicine. And artists, like everyone, need to support themselves and their families.